Real Lies on London Summers, Romance, and Recreating a Feeling

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Real Lies made my favorite album of the year so far with We Will Annihilate Our Enemies, an absolute and transfixing blast of dance music and hard-hitting lyricism that captures a distinct feeling that's so hard to put into words that you're surprised lyricist and vocalist Kev Kharas did so well doing so. I grabbed the boys—Kev and producer Patrick King, specifically—on a chat last month ahead of the release of their cracking new single "Let the Lips Fall Where They May," and they unpacked their outstanding release year for me as well as a bunch of other topics. It was a great conversation, one of my favorites in a while—check it out:

The blurb that came along with the new single mentioned being a tribute to midsummer freedom. Expand on that for me.
Kev: We don't really have seasons anymore, in the proper sense of the word. We basically have eight months of the same day for eight months in a row, over and over again. There's always an ambient-level drizzle in the air that's always gray and overcast. You don't see the sun or the sky, it's never really that cold it's always hovering around five and ten degrees—kind of tepid.

I've said this 30 times to people and they never get what I mean, but I always compare it to when we used to have big parties and there'd always be this glass ashtray that would get left out in the rain um and overnight. You'd come down in the morning, and there'd be dogends floating in this horrible gray miasma of ash and rain. London, for those eight months, feels like one of those but turned upside down.

That's very evocative.
Kev: Okay, good—that's finally landed. [Laughs] Then you have four months of what legitimately might be the best city in the world, where everything opens up and you're suddenly no shuttling between A and B on an overcrowded bus that was designed by the idiot Heatherwick, with no windows and it's all steamed up, full of condensation, just unhappy people being fed misery videos from their dopamine tech, hating themselves and hating their lives. You get the payoff of everything opening up, and you can walk around the city and you kind of have to go out every night, because it's impossible to stay in because of the bargain that you've made.

Patrick: The best thing about summer is cars driving around South London, listening to UK Garage and UK Funky on full volume. It's a blissful four months for that reason alone.

Kev: There's even a lyric in the song about this phenomenon. One of the horsemen of summer in London is at 3 p.m. on a Friday when workmen have finished for the day, and they're driving the Luton van rushing home to shower and get down to the local as quickly as possible. This is beautiful. You see this push for freedom happening in real time, dozens of times, across the city.

How often do you guys find yourselves going out at this point in your lives compared to when you were younger?
Kev: I probably go out in the summer four times a week. I don't go to the same places that I used to. I don't spend four nights a week in nightclubs—it's drinking outside of pubs, or sometimes in parks. That's more my speed now. But there's the occasional mad night. I've had a sort of accidental summer of love, where I'm a bit more ecstatic than I thought I was going to be. So that's been nice. It's been a late blooming.

Patrick: I don't go out on my own listening to eight hours of dubstep at clubs. I did it when I was 19, quite much.

Just considering the euphoric effect of going out that's captured in your guys' music, I have to imagine there was something missing in your guys' lives during lockdown.
Kev: Yeah, I think so. To be candid, some of the reason I got COVID a few times is because I didn't pay as much attention to the distancing as maybe I should've done. But there was a double-edged sword for me, because the second album wouldn't have probably ever been finished if COVID didn't happen, in some ways. It would've certainly taken even longer. Because of the loss of nightlife, I had to retreat into my memories, and it became very reflective and nostalgic. It was an album that felt like I was processing a lot of stuff that I'd trapped in my head for quite a number of years after the first album.

People have always said that our music sounds nostalgic or whatever. I'm not super keen on that word, but I have to admit, I hold my hands up when it comes to Lad Ash. Because of the loss of that real life happening around, you have to live inside your memories a little bit. It's that, or the television.

I think the latest album is phenomenal—my favorite record of the year so far, easily—and it also seems like a massive leap forward from what you two were doing on Lad Ash. Talk to me about how it came together.
Patrick: We spent a lot more time together in the quote-unquote studio, working on things a bit more collaboratively rather than just having an email project where
we were sending things and making an infinite number of changes as we go. It was a lot more spontaneous and energetic as a result, and it was also a lot more fun to do. We had a lot more open attitude where we were able to just keep rolling with an idea until it fits, and we seem to go to the point where we can sit down with things and are happy with the results now, which is a very blissful place to be. If you know you're putting the effort in, you know you're going to get something out the other end—not always, but most of the time.

Kev: I know we were just talking about nostalgia, but on Lad Ash it felt almost like nostalgia was the third member of the band. With this album, I made a conscious effort to sideline him and not invite him into the studio as much. We ostracized him and sent him to Corsica, and he became less of a tyrant. It was much easier for me and Pat to work and enjoy ourselves and make something that felt more dynamic, fluid, and responsive to the moment.

I did also make a conscious decision that I didn't want to live inside my
memories anymore. When people say "nostalgic," I always prefer "romantic" or maybe "sentimental." I knew that I didn't want to lose those elements. But also, it feels like everyone has this laundry list in their heads of complaints they have about the modern world—whether it's the environment, the government, the economy shrinking, tech billionaires, you can go on and on.

It felt like the more noble and harder decision for this album, rather than fall in line with that kind of consensus groupthink, would be to try to love the world without ignoring all of those elements—to love the modern world as it is, to be romantic about the modern world as it is, with all of its awful misery and atrocities included. That's really what I wanted to do with the lyrics. That's something that I didn't see anybody else really making a conscious effort to do, and I'm suspicious of things that can become mantras across across the culture. When you can recite these lists or complaints, it becomes arbitrary and separate from people—something like an automatism. People don't interrogate their own thoughts or feelings anymore, so I just wanted to embrace the present moment.

"LOVERWORLD" is something that stood out to me almost immediately when it comes to what you're talking about there. I do think the latest post-punk revival that took place earlier this decade had devolved into the laundry list feeling that you're describing. But when it comes to something like "LOVERWORLD," I almost feel like I'm hearing a hard-won optimism.
Kev: Optimism—it's interesting, that word. With all of our music, a lot of people think it's quite miserable a lot of the time. For me, it's always been about having a sense of romance in the music, rather than optimism. When I try to explain this, it's quite difficult for me to articulate myself, because when I say "romance," I don't just mean falling in love or having a great night out with your friends. It's the sense of your life being guided as if it's not scripted, in a fatalistic way—as if your life, very night out, could be a movie scene.

For me, romance encompasses breakups, heartbreak, being down on your luck, being broke—all of that stuff, this sense of cinematic, dramatic things happening and chaotically tumbling from one scene to another, having a life be an unpredictable adventure. I've always thought about life, and romance, in that way. So for me to make the jump to romanticizing the world as it is today isn't as hard as it is for other people, because to me romance has always been the lows as well as the highs.

There's the understanding, on some level, that you need one for the other to happen, which is a natural consequence of being around or living a hedonistic life from quite a young age. The high doesn't feel as good without the low. You realize that it's all part of the same thing.

"Wild Sign I Choose You" is a really strong example of that romantic approach. When it comes the song's opening lines, I'm really curious to hear you guys talk about your own memories of being 17.
Kev: I don't want to keep coming back to nostalgia, but there's a thin strip of territory between who you are and what you've done. All our music, really, is about the former—but it isn't really divisible from the latter. On "Wild Sign," I felt like I'd come as close a I ever have at summing that idea up.

17 isn't just something you leave behind—that's when you feel like you find out who you are, and I don't feel like I've changed since then. It sounds stupid, because so much has happened, but I honestly just feel like the same person just trying to muddle through. I still like I'm more prone to sentimentality than everyone else around me, more or less. I still am constantly on the lookout for adventures, and not really wanting nights to end. I'm still prone to being a bit of a prima donna as Pat can attest at various stages in the record's production. I don't handle things very well sometimes, and get quite down very quickly. I vacillate between being very up and being very down very quickly.

The things I'd do when I was 17—I wonder how much I can really say, because I'm slightly worried that my neighbors are listening, but it was the first time that I took ecstasy, and that's something which had an incredibly profound effect on me. I don't think Real Lies would exist without that. It was one summer, but without that summer, my life would be very different to what it is now. I don't think I'd be doing this, speaking to you now. If I was making music, it would sound very different. A lot of the friends I've met since then probably had similar experiences, and I probably wouldn't have met them unless we had that in common.

That's the wild sign—that thirst for adventure, chaos, and unpredictability. The song is really about meeting people at various points all through my life where, as soon as I met them, I saw that same thing inside them. You're just naturally drawn to each other.

Patrick: Yeah, and how much value there is in all these experiences by thinking how we, at the moment, are very lucky to be doing what we're doing and to be who we are. But we're also lucky to have these memories and experiences that we can draw from to inform who we are. We've walked the streets at 3 a.m., stood outside house parties, going to clubs, and spent some days making hungover music. All of that stuff, whether it's kind of quote-unquote good or bad, all feeds into who you are and what you're doing today.

You guys have known each other for quite a while at this point.How have you witnessed each other changing over the years, and how has your own relationship to each other changed as you guys have kept making music together?
Patrick: Obviously, there was three of us in the band to start with. Since Lad Ash, the last two records have been me and Kev. We're quite lucky in that we're quite at the opposite ends of things. There's that Oasis documentary where Noel says something like, "Liam's a dog and I'm a cat." We're not quite at that ends of the extreme, but we do complement each other quite nicely with what we do. I'm quite happy organizing tours and doing spreadsheets, planning all the travel. I don't think we would be in a very good place if Kev was trusted with that.

Kev: We would be either dead or in jail if it was me just on the spreadsheet. I shouldn't be near the spreadsheets. They're dangerous things in the wrong hands.

We've known each other for nearly 20 years now, which feels like a really strange thing to say. I've seen Pat growing to himself, whereas I feel like I've kind of played the same riff for um 27 years—but it still sounds good to me.

Have there been any moments in your guys' relationship where you've worried about hitting a point of no return?
Kev: Between the first and second albums, there were maybe a couple of points where I did wonder if the second album was ever going to get made and what was really going to happen. But I was very lost in those years. It's quite good that I didn't really have anything else going on. I wasn't capable of doing anything really for those years. I came out of that bubble, thank God, and I'm still going.

Pat: Who we are today and what we're doing—we're living through our future nostalgia. I want to look back and be like, "I made these great records when I was a bit younger. You just want to do good work. I probably would be a lot sadder as a person if I wasn't doing Real Lies. It's a real source of pride to be involved, because Kev's a brilliant lyricist.

Kev: Thank you.

Pat: You're welcome mate.

Having gotten this third record out there, do you guys feel like you're able to work at a faster clip moving forward?
Kev: Personally, I feel quite liberated now that the third one's out. I'm much more proud of We Will Annihilate Our Enemies because we managed to write it in such a comparatively short span of time—it really was just over a year, from start to finish, whereas Lad Ash was seven years by the time it came out. There were songs that were written maybe even before the first album came out that were on it.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, but there's two ways of doing things, really. You can use what you've managed to do already, be conservative, and worry endlessly about pleasing the people that already like you—or you can throw all of that away really and just be relentlessly aggressive and do what feels true to you. It's much more fun to be in a group where you feel like you're breaking new ground and getting hurt by new people rather than just consolidating and looking after the people that already like it. Maybe there were elements of that with the delay in the second album.

Pat can speak to it, but on the technical side of things We Will Annihilate Our Enemies is 10-15 BPM higher on average. It's quicker across the board, that's a symbol of the way that we tore into it, and the aggression that we brought to the writing process.

Pat: Also, after a while, you kind of realize the music industry is just complete nonsense. It's just absurd, all these things that people are doing every day. Making music is heavenly, whereas the rest of it feels like you're pushing a big boulder up a hill for forever. So fuck it, let's just focus on the music and make the best thing we can make.It's a freeing experience, until you're then reminded that you do need to be posting Reels.

I do feel like a bit of pushback is emerging on the artists' end when it comes to having to maintain a constant social media presence. I would hope that the wheel starts turning in a different direction at some point—but you never know what they're going to come up with next!
Kev: Yeah. I don't know. I mean, it sounds absurd, right? There's this weird expectation of permanence for these things as well. No one's out there now going, "I wish I'd spent more time doing Facebook posts."

Or NFTs.
Kev: Yeah, that was very shortly after that.

Do you guys have day jobs?
Patrick: Not full-time, but yeah. I work in a primary school with kids. I'm a teacher, basically.

Kev: I'm a writer and editor.

Tell me about balancing those jobs with making music.
Patrick: Despite my love for making music, I do see it also as work—what I've got to do every day. And if I'm not fulfilling myself by doing this work, then I'm not really being who I should be. So sitting down to do music as often as I can is the work, and the other work I have to do alongside that to pay the bills or whatever is viewed in a similar way—but you just get on with it.

Working at a school, part of it is fulfilling and nice. I don't feel like I'm wasting my life, because I'm working with young people and helping them. But, also, I don't really care about that. I just like sitting down and working on music, often on my own—being very lonely, like, "Why am I sitting here chopping up samples or moving little MIDI blocks up and down the screen over and over again?" Often, you do it for days on end, and nothing sounds good at all. That's the work I like doing, and if I wasn't doing that, I wouldn't feel very fulfilled with my life.

Kev: I feel like those old Steamboat Willie-era cartoons where there would be someone with their feet on two different trains at once and they're crisscrossing the tracks. I feel like that every day when I wake up and when I go to bed. Then, every three months, I have to nuke my own brain to get to be able to do what I have to do for work and then try to pick up all the pieces and sort of—I wouldn't say "Keep Real Lies going," because Pat does that, basically.

But this is, for me, the most special thing. The experiences that I've had because of Real Lies are the best moments of my life. If there was a top 20, at least seven of them would be Real Lies-related—probably more. So it's strange, because I do what I do to pay my bills—well, I don't know if it pays the bills. But then you've got this other thing, which is a machine for generating incredible experiences—moments that can't be bought or would be parts of life that are impossible to access otherwise.

Also, going back to the world keeps me in touch with who I am, really, to do Real Lies. The harder I work, the more special it is when I can return to that space where I'm writing and I'm free of outside pressures, and it's just me and my pen, pad, and music, and I can create something that didn't exist before—and no one else gets to tell me what to do with it, apart from Pat.

There's references to Trainspotting in "Wild Sign," and the new single gestures towards Goodbye Charlie Bright as well. I'm curious to hear you guys talk about your taste in film and how that informs your artistic sensibilities.
Patrick: What have I been watching recently? The World at War. I don't know if you know that one. It's 1970s and incredibly detailed, about the Second World War, which is making me sound like Mark from Peep Show.

Kev: During the making and writing of the album, I got really into Hal Hartley. I had the pleasure of talking to him recently, which was really nice. "Finding Money" was heavily inspired by his films. The first thing I think about when I think about his films is the way that the characters don't have this naturalistic dialogue. They just get winched from scene to scene and deliver these perfectly conceived two-minute dramatic monologues to each other, and then the film just moves through them while they're worrying about their own feelings.

I found that really inspiring, so there's this back-and-forth on "Finding Money" where me and Jessica Barden wanted to write it as this much more clipped version of Hal Hartley, where the lines last 20 seconds rather than three minutes. I wanted it to feel like they weren't really speaking or listening to each other. The song really is about the gap between people's fantasies and reality. The people in the song are talking more to their fantasies—their own fantasy worlds—more than they are the other person in that purely hypothetical romantic relationship.

So he was a big influence, and then there's someone like Andrea Arnold.

Patrick: i was just literally just thinking that, Kev.

You guys did the Congress club nights that were influenced by the Boy's Own nights from the '90s. I'm curious to hear you guys talk about drawing from those kind of influences.
Kev: Boy's Own was easy to get into because I grew up always wanting those subcultural components. There was the anthology of fanzines which, whenever we moved house, followed us around like a Bible. I think I still got it on a bookshelf somewhere, albeit covered in dubious powders. It had all these like lists of what's good and what isn't, and these piss-takey articles about acid house or people that wore the wrong clothes. To me, as someone who came more from a punk or indie background, that felt like a really nice meeting point.

There's this other element as well, which is where I'm from. I was born in the same place as Andrew Weatherall and Terry Farley. The realization that people could come from that part of the world and move into a nationwide and predominantly London-based dance scene...there's nothing else cool that has ever happened where I'm from. No other cool people have ever come from there. So when I saw this subcultural and literary element—and also, obviously, the music's amazing—it felt like the full package to me.

What were your earliest interactions with rave culture and dance music?
Patrick: We're quite lucky in the UK, in that while growing up rave music was a real big part obvious culture. You'd switch on Top of the Pops and there'd be the Prodigy on there or something. So it' always been part of the same thing as all the other indie and guitar-based music that we grew up with. I remember going to youth club when I was a kid and everyone was just messing around on the decks with UK garage records. At the time, you're just like, "Oh my God, this is the best music ever." You can dance to it, and it's got quite a few layers of meaning.

Kev: I remember being 8, 9, 10 years old and watching Top of the Pops and there was this mid-'90s charts dance group—the aftermath of rave, but it contained traces of what had happened. There's always this pull to things that happen in culture just before you're sentient or old enough to really understand them—and chart dance was the echo of that, really. By that point, everything was well-worn ground. Clubs had been turned into capitalist endeavors, and they weren't feral in the fields anymore. When I was younger, going to a club felt really exciting as well, so I'm not slagging it off.

I remember being 13 years old and going to house parties with people playing UK garage, and being really excited about that. A bit later on, I had some detours into punk and stuff, but when my friends learned to drive, we realized that jungle and drum'n'bass sounded much better in cars than, like, Rancid. That's also when we started taking ecstasy, so we'd combine the two often in ways that weren't safe. You know, we did a lot of stupid things. There's a line in "Shadowlands": It wasn't big and it wasn't clever, but neither were we.

When I moved to London, there was a third wave of going out and having those nightclubs. There was a sense when I first arrived that you could go out any night of the week and, if you went down the stairs into any dive bar or walked into the right pub, you could find something that would change the course of your life. Pat really loves dance music and is an authority on it. whereas I loved what dance music allowed me to do—the situations it would push me into. You're making memories in those scenarios, and then the dance music's playing—so that's where my more sentimental relationship with it comes from. Dance music created these situations for me that I could be in—meeting people, having fun, having adventures, having romantic or fraternal friendship encounters—and the music survives in a bubble of those memories.

Actress recently tweeted, "Rave was a bedroom aesthetic—not a lived or schooled experience. A memory." I'm curious to hear what your guys' thoughts are on that, because it's an interesting thing to put forth.
Kev: Yeah, I can definitely see where that was coming from. There's that incredible old Burial interview when he talks about his brother coming back in the morning from raves, and he's trying to build a picture of what his brother's been doing—but he can probably smell the smoke and the beer. I've already mentioned that kind of thing for me—chart dance, the echo of it, and the echo of something that predated my own sentience.

I grew up next to a motorway with my bed behind my bedroom window. I had this wireless radio, and every night I'd scrobble the dial between the medium-wave and pick up all these strange transmissions from up the road in London, which was 25 miles away. You'd get this mix of like talk radio—cab drivers moaning about the congestion charge, updates on the Stephen Lawrence murder trial or Cardboard City—and then you'd move the dial a little bit and get incredible pirate radio transmissions with amen breaks, jungle, and UK garage. I'd fall asleep listening to this combination, and what I didn't realize until a couple of years ago is that it's someone talking over rave music with the sound of the rave at a remove. You're not there in the room, but you're connected somehow. You're picking up on the frequency from miles away. I don't want to get too Freudian about it, but maybe with each Real Lies song, I've been trying to somehow recreate that childhood bedroom experience.